Sunday, August 3, 2008
[Update 10-18-2008: Further in, I also take into account Krugman's recent Nobel prize as well as Robert Reich's "Supercapitalism."]
I have found that a common error in the critiques that economists proffer (especially those of the Chicago school of thought) is to hone in on small portions of concepts (tiny in fact), analyze that single point, and then dismiss the whole of an argument. Call it particularism or maybe just throwing the baby out with the bathwater. I feel that way about Paul Krugman’s review of John Gray’s False Dawn.
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Tuesday, May 6, 2008
A.J. Marr has written an excellent essay on the notion of the meme and why he believes it to be essentially a poor metaphor for the complexities of human behavior. It is well-researched and thoughtful, but in the end, relegates the concept of the meme to the land of mixed metaphors and gives it too much credit of control over human behavior.
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Wednesday, April 16, 2008
If there is such a thing as free will, then we are left with choices and we have the capacity to reason about them, and that leads us to evidence. Evidence, information that has suffered the test of falsehood, can help us to ascertain our choices—not to know if our choice is correct—but to know why we made it and to illustrate to ourselves why we would make that choice again. In that, even when the choice is the wrong choice, we can find solace in accountability. We surveyed the information, ascertained its correctness, and then made a decision. This is reason. Read more…
Saturday, February 2, 2008
Okay, I didn’t contribute actual Jell-O to the infosphere[^1], but weirdly enough, after reading Chris Anderson’s “The Big Lie About Free” I got to thinking that what’s really silly about all these complaints about the seeming decline in value of media is that the idea of the promotional giveaway is so old! How old, you say? Read more…
Tuesday, February 8, 2005
On January 5th of this year Bill Gates, in an interview with CNET made a statement that irked quite a few people. After the interviewer asked Mr. Gates if he thought intellectual property laws should be reformed, Mr. Gates replied,
“No, I’d say that of the world’s economies, there’s more that believe in intellectual property today than ever. There are fewer communists in the world today than there were. There are some new modern-day sort of communists who want to get rid of the incentive for musicians and moviemakers and software makers under various guises. They don’t think that those incentives should exist.”
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